That Time You E-Mailed Your Co-Worker Peter When You Meant To E-Mail Your Boyfriend Peter...

Gmail has introduced another experiment in protecting e-mailers from themselves. First there was protection against late-night drunken e-mailing you may later regret, in which, between certain hours of the night, you must prove your sobriety by answering math questions before your e-mail goes out. (Not sure how Gmail could help the DoubleX staff, documented daytime drinkers.)

Now there’s “Got the wrong Bob?,” a Gmail lab meant to head off those embarrassing auto-complete “to” line glitches. I’m sure we’ve all had them (and equally sure that none of mine have involved anyone named “Bob,” given that I only know one). Some are harmless: I spent a summer e-mailing my intern when I meant to e-mail my roommate by the same name. But luckily the subject matter was only embarrassing in its mundanity, things like “Did you get milk?” and—I’m not joking—“Whoa, did you see the new look of Gmail?”

I was once the “wrong Bob.” The misaddressed e-mail came from a friend of my mother’s, someone out-of-state whom I had met only once or twice. His e-mail was intended for his wife, whose name starts with the same letters as mine. They’d had a fight that morning. He wrote her a beautiful, poetic apology. And then sent it to me, the daughter of one of his peers. Awkward!

In the spirit of our ongoing call for your “awkward and wrong” e-mail/Twitter/texting/etc. tales, inspired by Gmail’s latest experiment, and as a show of solidarity with my mom’s friend, please share your own moments of being or sending to the wrong Bob. You can send them to me by e-mail. And we may publish your story here on the site. (Anonymity requests will of course be granted.)

Tags: awkward and wrong, email, gmail, reader submissions

Samantha Henig is the associate editor of Double X, and can be reached at samantha.henig@doublex.com.

Comments

ENOUGH ALREADY

By: theDA | Thu, 10/15/2009 - 14:50

Okay. I've about had it with the cat fighting and bizzare-o petitions. Readerships shouldn't dictate who writes what columns and what they say.

As someone who was outraged at the onset of the original post, annoyed by the flip "apology" and unsettled by the "meh" intervention by Samantha I am floored by the heightened levels of ridiculousness that have been spawned by all this.

Enough already. There is a whole big bad world out there to explore and silencing the opinions of one bone-headed writer only satisfies your cheap desire for a pound of flesh. It doesn't move the conversation forward.

If you believe in the First Amendment, you'll knock it off and be grateful that we can all kvetch about this in the first place.

Did We Get the Wrong Samantha?

By: writingbabe | Thu, 10/15/2009 - 12:40

Or the wrong Lucinda? Because lots of us wrote to both of you to protest Lucinda's original post to the woman who was drugged while out with friends and left to fend for herself, her subsequent defense of that post, and your "I can see where you're coming from" non-response to the uproar.

We must have commented to both the wrong Lucinda and the wrong Samantha, because today, the crickets are chirping. Where there should be a considered response to this mess front and center on DoubleX, there is instead a resounding silence, from which we are apparently expected to be distracted by someone trying the French woman's diet (and fashion tips!) and a question about e-mail mishaps.

Where is the management response? Where is the considered discussion of what went wrong and how it will be corrected going forward? Where is Lucinda's apology?

On a more practical front, where is the announcement of either the discontinuation of the Friend or Foe column (a dubious, cat-fight concept to begin with) or a new columnist for said column? Or the announcement that Lucinda's job will now indeed be to provoke controversy or "debate" in an opinion rather than advice column?

Seriously, if you're the wrong Samantha and she's the wrong Lucinda, let me know. I doubt I'm the only one who would like a real answer from the right ones.